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Hi, my name's Jo Williams.

We're here in the Meadows Park, in
Edinburgh
to talk about children's development, and
to think
about how an understanding of children's
development helps
us to interpret children's well being and
mental health.
Taking a developmental approach is
important for a number of reasons.
Firstly, allows us to spot and interpret
different patterns of behavior.
Secondly, we can think about development
in
terms of processes, but also developmental
outcomes.
One kind of developmental outcome is often
referred
to as a milestone, developmental
milestone, and in typical
development we can plot a range of
milestones that
children usually proceed through as part
of their development.
And this allows us also to see when
development is atypical.
When a child is maybe not following the
typical patterns of development and this
is important
because it will then allow us to support
that child in the ways they need
supporting.
In this week we're going to cover three
core things.
In the rest of this video we're going to
be
having a look at developmental approaches
to understanding children adolescence.
In the second video we're going to look at
influences on development.
And then in the third and final video for
this week we're going
to be turning to approaches which try and
explain well-being and mental health.
These are often referred to as
Developmental Psycho Pathology Theories.
Psychologists define development as the
process by which an
organism, human or animal, grows and
changes through its life-span.
And developmental psychology is the
discipline that attempts
to describe and explain the changes that
occur over
time in thought, behaviour, reasoning, and
functioning of
a person due to biological, individual,
and environmental influences.

Children are qualitatively different from

adults.
They're not born as mini adults and
they're not born as empty vessels.
They, they're complex in their
development.
And sometimes development is easy to
observe such
as development of walking or development
of language.
Other areas of development are much more
difficult to observe
for example changes in thought processes
or changes in emotions.
Some developments occur slowly and
gradually over long periods of time.
Where as other times of development see
rapid
change which we often refer to as growth
spurts.
And this is particularly true early in
development and in adolescence.
In order to understand development,
psychologists
break it down into manageable chunks.
One of the ways psychologists break
development down
is by thinking about development as
occurring in phases.
I'm using the term phases, not stages,
because
stages has kind of a particular
theoretical connotation.
The phases that we usually break
development down into are firstly before
birth.
So the development now happens between
conception and a child being born.
Then the first two years of life we'll
refer to as Infancy and this
is a time when there is rapid growth and
in every aspect of development.
By the age of about two and a
half, children are half their adult height
on average.
So it's, it's a really important phase of
development.
The next phase is from about three to
about 10, and we refer to this as
childhood.
It's often broken down into
early childhood, mid-childhood and later
childhood.
And it's a time when you see refinement of
physical skills, motor skills, but also
huge cognitive changes.
The third and final phase in terms
of child and adolescent development is
adolescence.
We usually refer to this as the second

decade of life, from around about 11 to

20.
And again this is often broken down into
early adolescence, a time when young
people go through puberty, change school
systems
and begin to form strong peer group
relationships.
And then they move into mid-adolescence,
and then later adolescence is
characterized
often by moving more away from the family
and moving into independent adulthood.
A second way of breaking down development
into manageable
parts is by thinking about different
aspects of development.
One aspect of development is physical
development.
This includes motor coordination, fine
motor
coordination, growth in terms of height
but
also brain development and physical
development can
be quite easily observable but not
necessarily.
Another area of development is social and
emotional development.
This includes the friendships we make, the
relationships we have with our parents,
how we feel about the social world we're
in, how we manage our emotions.
These are all parts of social and
emotional development.
The third aspect of development is
cognition, cognitive development.
This includes our thought processes such
as memory, reasoning, attention.
Some of it's unobservable so it can be
difficult to detect.
However, while there might be three main
aspects of development,
we've got to remember that the child
develops as a whole.
The different aspects of development don't
occur
in isolation, they all interact with one
another.
And act, or acted out at the same time.
So imagine a situation where a child comes
to play in a play park like this one.
First of all, they have to think about
what they might like to play on.
They have to remember what they've enjoyed
before, they have
to look around the environment and see
what opportunities are there.
And they have to make a decision about
what they're going to play on.

Those are all cognitive activities.

The next thing is they have to physically
get
there, they have to use their gross
locomotive skills
to move over to the equipment and then
coordinate
their body to make the piece of equipment
work.
That's physical development.
If they were the friends they may be
discussing what they're
going to play or negotiating which piece
of equipment to play on.
They may be joking and laughing and
enjoying themselves and that's social and
emotional development.
So all aspects of development are involved
in the simple act of coming to
a play park and deciding what to play on
and enjoying playing on it.
When we thing about development, as well
as and phases of development
and aspects of development, psychologists
are
also interested in patterns of
development.
One of the key things to recognize is that
develop
isn't always progressive it doesn't mean a
positive change necessarily.
It's just a change.
Change can be continuous and it
can continuous improvement or continuous
decline.
For example, at around about the age of
18 months, children begin to engage in
pretend play.
For them any object can become something
different and fascinating.
Like a banana can become a telephone, for
example.
As they develop pretend play increases.
But around middle childhood it begins to
decline
as other forms of play become more
prominent.
This pattern of continuous development is
often known as an inverted
U function, where you can see that
development increases and then declines.
You can also get U-shaped continuous
change, where you see an
apparent decline, but actually, it leads
to an improvement in development.
And often this is true of cognitive
element,
where a child's behavior may look like,
the
behavior is becoming more difficult or

they're not,
they're not managing suc, to succeed in a
task.
But actually cognitively, they're
re-evaluating how to perform
the task, and then their, their
performance improves.
And that's a U-Shaped function.
So there are various patterns of
continuous change.
Sometimes change is very rapid and
sometimes change is slow and gradual.
As well as continuous change, another
pattern of
change that psychologists supported is
stage changes and
this is where you have changes in ability
which seem to take quite a dramatic shift.
A classic stage theory of development is
Piaget theory.
He outlined four stages of development.
The first between birth and two is the
sensory motor period.
The second stage is between around about 3
and 7.
Which is the pre operational stage of
development.
Concrete operations is between around 7
and 11.
From the age of around 11 to 15, children
move on to the formal operational stage of
thinking.
And Piaget said that each of these stages
of development
is typified by new range of cognitive
abilities or operations.
That allow children to cognitively perform
at a different level.
So in his research, you can see in his
particular
experiments and tasks how certain stages
of development, children will
fail a task, and when they move to the
next
stage of development, they'll be able to
succeed in a task.
These different patterns of development
highlights the complexity of development.
We've looked at a range of different
psychological ideas about children and
adolescence development.
So how do we come up with these ideas?
Well we use research methods.
And one of the key research methods we use
is observation.
We observe children in everyday natural
settings and
also in settings that we've created for
them.
And we may look at that play for

example or have them interact with other,

other children.
And we can do this even in a play park.
Another very simple method is to look at
children's drawings.
In these drawings here, we can see
children of different ages have created
them.
This drawing was by a very young child.
Who wasn't able to hold a pen or pencil
yet, but
was able to make a drawing by using paint,
and palm prints.
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This picture is by a slightly older child,
who's able to grip a pencil.
So, their, their fine motor development is
coming along.
And they've been able to choose what
colors they want to use and I'm sure they
will know exactly what this is a picture
of but I'm not completely sure I know.
This picture is by a child who's about
three years old and
they've got lots of detail here, we've got
a sun and a sky.
We've got three people, and we've got a
flower and a house.
What they haven't got really is, is scale
or perspective.
So the flower and the person are the
same height and they're both bigger than
the house.
And the arms are half way down the legs.
But nevertheless it's a happy picture.
There's lots of bright colors and you can
tell what the child is trying to convey.
In this final picture, this is a picture
drawn by a four to five year old.
And this shows a happy child in a, in
a garden scene with flowers and trees and
blue sky.
And it conveys happiness, because the
character
within the picture is smiling and happy.
And it's full of bright colors.
We use drawings systematically as well,
where we present children with drawings.
This is an example of research on
bullying,
where we draw really simple stick men
doing different
behaviors, and we ask children for their
definition
of the behavior and their interpretation
of what's happening.
You can use this kind of research
across different cultures and different
ages of children.
To reveal something about the development

of understanding bullying.
And also whether that's consistent or
different, across different cultures.
As well as drawing's we can interview
children and find
out how they feel about things, and their
understanding of things.
And how this changes with age.
So interview techniques are really an
important part of the repertoire
of research methods when we're working
with children and young people.
When children get a little bit older, we
can also use very simple questionnaires.
This is a psychological measure of
anxiety.
There are, there are many others, which
look at anxiety as well.
And it asks very simple questions in
age-appropriate language.
And the children have to read them and
then give
a response, to how often they may feel
like this.
So for example the first item is, I worry
about things.
Later down, I am good at sports.
By filling out this kind of simple
questionnaire, we can
tell something about whether that child is
experience anxiety or not.
We also use experimental methods in
Psychology.
Experiments sound a little bit
frightening, but actually often what
we do is that of very play like activities
with
children's toys or things that look like
toys and engage
with children in tasks that they will find
really interesting.
Hugh, who is a lecturer in psychology,
will now tell
us a little bit about the psychology and
development lab.
In the psychology department.
And he'll demonstrate some of the
experimental techniques
that they use with children in their
research.
>> So, in this study we're assessing how
young
children understand langauge, and how they
learn to integrate
words together to create more complex
meanings, and then
learn to integrate sentences to create
more complex discourse understanding.
Pretty complicated task.
And in particular we're interested in how

they do
this on a sort of millisecond by a
millisecond basis.
So how words entering the ear can rapidly
change their behavior and how that can be
affected by this sort of top down that
prior knowledge of the task to be done.
And we do it using a really simple game.
So in this one, we have a bunch of little
toys the kids get
to play with, and we play them
some instructions that they just have to
follow.
And as they follow these instructions we
monitor
what they do, we record what they do.
And we also have a camera that's built
into the stage and is able to track where
they're looking over time to see how their
gaze behavior changes as they hear these
different sentences.
Which gives us a really sort of
nice, implicit, accurate measure of what
they're thinking.
As they're hearing these different
sentences.
And the task is as simple as follows.
They hear a bunch of instructions, like
tickle the squirrel with the feather.
So there's two things you could ave done
there, you
could have picked up the big feather to
tickle the
squirrel or you could have just used your
hand to
go and tickle the squirrel who is holding
a feather here.
So tickle the squirrel with the feather is
ambiguous.
So the type of interpretation you give to
it.
You know, we can easily figure that out
from your eye movement.
So, long before you raise your hands up to
pick up that feather, you started looking
at it.
So we know within like a couple of
milliseconds, you will decided on a
particular interpretation.
>> Okay.
>> And now, we can vary different things
in
the instructions, to see whether you're
sensitive to it.
So for instance, if I'd said, tickle, the
squirrel with the feather,
that would have meant something different
from tickle the squirrel with the feather.
So we can test kids as young as sort of 3,
4 years of age are sensitive to these

sorts of cues.
>> We've just considered research methods
and spoken
to Hugh about the developmental lab in
psychology.
But it's important to remember that we all
work with children in
one form or another and we use these
skills in our everyday practice.
We observe children and we learn something
about how
they're developing and their wellbeing
from our observations of them.
We speak to children and learn about their
development directly from them.
And we sometimes use little tasks during
and even short questionnaires with them
in our everyday practice, especially if
we're
working in education or in clinical
practice.
In this week we've focused on three main
things.
The first thing we discussed was how we
define children's development, and we've
defined development with psychology.
Then we went on to look at how we
characterize children's development.
And we thought about phases, aspects, and
patterns of development.
And finally, we looked at how
psychologists study child development.
In the next video, we'll look at
influences on development.
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